


A Song for the Little Things

by LittleRaven



Category: Clarissa (Comics)
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Parent/Child Incest, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 20:26:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: Clarissa develops her interests.





	A Song for the Little Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



A brush, a scrunchie just placed down beside it. She moved away from the mirror-less dresser. It was time for work, and they frowned on frumpy, Clarissa knew. Hair: practical but feminine. 

So there. She met them halfway, just like she was asked. She wasn’t sure what the other half was meant to look like. At the moment, it would do. 

She smiled when told, and it pleased them, which felt soothing. She went on her way. Everything was normal, just as it should be. 

Clarissa went to work. 

 

“Thank god I’m not a receptionist.” She said it before they could, the joke old but always her own. Pause for laughter, not unwelcome for all that it’s endless. On her desk, a hand-drawn blueprint of a new building, as yet only on the paper as brought from her mind.

She had moved from art to architecture by high school. Her buildings were always full of little rooms; when asked where she put the secret passages, she very nearly added them too. Because they asked, even if they hadn’t meant it. But no—those make things far too complicated. Better to have one entrance, maybe two, and then you know what’s going to happen. More or less. 

Clarissa hadn’t counted on that getting her out of the house; it was the one thing, it seemed, that actually worked. 

The first time, the first day of her major-relevant classes, she’d come home late. They had smiled at her as they said it. There may have been a swear word; Clarissa never remembered. It hadn’t been any different. Maybe it would’ve been, if they’d—if she’d known. She never would have left again—or she would have, she’d have fled and never entered the house again. Maybe that would have been the unbearable thing, going back when she finally knew she could leave it. 

There was a time when she stopped going. There simply wasn’t any space for her anymore, as things got worse. She didn’t ask why, although the expectation that she would weighed the air around the table whenever it was spoken of. Daddy came home late every night, and of course that was bad. Of course she needed to make it up to him; but he couldn’t even stay awake anymore, so that was not a possibility, even if he still tried. It made Mommy even angrier. Clarissa tried to show up when asked, take care of her too, but Mommy didn’t want her help with the cooking, or the laundry. So Clarissa stayed in her room when she wasn’t at school, and waited, and sometimes she woke up no different to how she’d gotten in bed in the first place. More times, eventually.

They didn’t even notice when she filled out the documents to get into a dorm. She barely noticed herself, that she was old enough to do it. But look. It was the thing people did, therefore it was the thing she should do. Everyone knew that at home, and so they knew it here. What a chore it would be for them all to talk it over. Clarissa did it herself, at the college campus, and she didn’t tell them when it was all done. 

He came over then, that night she moved in. The room wasn’t empty; Clarissa had a roommate, a person she didn’t register except to know she was there, how she didn’t needle her with questions or warnings. He saw it; he moved to walk in, teeth bared in a smile—in other animals, Clarissa had thought, this was overt aggression—but the girl was not interested in anything but going to bed and no one’s Papa Bear was going to stand in the way of that. He stood at the door, waiting to pull her out. Clarissa didn’t walk up to him. 

She hadn’t moved at all. Clarissa usually didn’t. He hadn’t even been asking her to speak, so how could he fault her? She should’ve known to say—or do—something, she was all grown up. Clarissa didn’t need him to tell her; it had been obvious. She was to go to him. 

Clarissa knew girls in college were not supposed to tuck their fathers into bed. So she didn’t. It was for the best, that they all be normal. It was. 

Of course she didn’t get that from her friends. She didn’t have any. That was one more thing she was doing wrong, had done wrong her whole life; but look, wasn’t that why she should stay here? To make sure less things were done wrong? Clarissa knew that. She knew it from all the people back home who loved her, all the people who would’ve been her friends, who wanted to love her, if only she did things right. 

Therefore, Clarissa had reasoned, this was the best course of action. Daddy wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of her anymore. He wouldn’t have to worry about her fitting in with this world. She would do her best. Daddy understood. 

You make me so tired, he’d said. Clarissa, I don’t think it’s your fault, but I wish you would see that and stop. 

Roommate threw a shoe at his face. The arm slunk back under the blanket. Clarissa stayed still and quiet as Daddy’s reddening face swelled, before he closed his mouth and slammed the door. It must be better this way. Truly. She didn’t want to make him feel any worse. She stood there after, until the other shoe hit her in the thigh. You can thank me by not creeping me out, the blanket pronounced, and Clarissa got under her own, before kicking it off to sleep in the warm air of the room. 

It spun around her once she was down, spun light; she half-got up again, lurching gently, before letting herself sink back, only it didn’t feel like sinking. She didn’t know what it felt like—wasn’t that always the case, Clarissa not knowing, and maybe this had been a bad idea. Her heart pressed against her ribcage, and she could hear it over the snoring. The damn snoring. She’d never had to actually put up with that before. Her lips twitched at the edges. Well, there was always a price to pay for what you want; she would have to allow it. She chose to resign herself to the noise and she lay there, almost humming, not quite settled down all night. Her sleep was dreamless. 

Roommate got a thank you note next morning. Clarissa waited for a response; in the back of her head a little girl pulled away when she told her things, finding her strange. Clarissa wasn’t telling her anything—she just wanted to know if her thank yous were a good idea here. 

It wouldn’t have taught her how to proceed, but whether to proceed at all. A shrug and a no problem were enough. She moved out next semester, and they hadn’t spoken much by the time it was finished; Clarissa had tip-toed into small talk, then gloried in it, just conversing with someone who seemed as determined to live in peace as Clarissa herself was, with much less tightness in her neck over it, shoulders slouching freely, conversation coming when it came, and only then. No ritual of manners. It had been nice. 

The buildings brought wider spaces now, rooms with windows and winds blowing through. One end of the house to the other sometimes; it was friendly, she was told, and she learned to smile without a prompt. There were different kinds of smiles, ones to make the bad kinds bearable. 

It was nice not to have to draw people to be friendly. That had not been what they thought they were saying, but Clarissa told them so all the same. She held it close, with the sight of her thank you note being tucked into a jean pocket while the girl beside her moved to leave for class. 

She held them through the work, the maquettes built neat and clean under her hands and her quiet eyes, until she forgot them in the little white cardboard pieces she slotted into each other, carefully glued onto the black boards of her houses’ steps. Clarissa’s house was always clean and bright, stark in her dorm, fitting in well with the assignments of her classmates. 

Clarissa’s office now was just as neat, the drawings laid out and then put away in due time, for all the fuss she made when leaning over them. She had always done them quietly, intently, knowing she would have to stop, and she fit everything she could into every line, the shapes precise and bursting from the page; no one told her to smile then. Not at home, and not when she pulled them out on break or on a slow day. 

Some things can’t be left behind entirely. 

She stood, and her office was as clean as when she’d arrived. 

 

Clarissa set the last blueprint against the living room wall. It would go with the abstract print above it. She loved drawing in the living room, wide in all it’s smallness, every surface there for her to use or ignore as she would. Sometimes the Ikea furniture was wiped of any pigment from her pencils. Others, she didn’t put all her supplies away before she stopped, and she had time to do it in the morning, or when she got back home. She had time. It came with an indefinite, so unreal, end, to be set by her and no one else as far as her understanding went, because when she could choose where to stop it was less of an end, more the rest of her life.


End file.
